4—
Mao Dun, Zhang Tianyi, and the Social Impediments to Realism
Mao Dun:
Politics of the Detail
Much as the dramatic political events of the 1920s impinged on the life of Ni Huanzhi, drawing him away from his teaching career, so too did they induce the young critic and editor Shen Yanbing
the Chinese Communist party's Propaganda Department in Shanghai and early the next year went to Canton to represent the leftist faction of the Shanghai branch of the Nationalist party at the Second National Assembly. (The Communist party, it will be remembered, had formed an alliance with the Nationalist party in 1923 on orders from the Comintern.) In Canton, Shen made the acquaintance of Wang Jingwei
In spite of this setback, Shen continued his political work with unabated energy, spending his days at meetings and in organizational work (but devoting his evenings to research into Chinese mythology, an activity he apparently found therapeutic). Early in 1927 the left wing of the Nationalist party consolidated its power in Wuhan
[2] Mao Dun, "Jiju jiuhua," in Lu Xun et al., Chuangzuo de jingyan , p. 50.
[3] Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu 1:322.
[4] Mao Dun, "Jiju jiuhua," in Lu Xun et al., Chuangzuo de jingyan , p. 54.
contacts instructed him to take the draft on to Nanchang
Shen's first creative works were thus born of political frustration, but they also represented to him an expression of his will to live. He later wrote:
I experienced one of the most complex scenes of China's chaotic modern history; as a result I came to feel disillusioned with the contradictions of human life. Feeling profoundly depressed and alone—to say nothing of the external circumstances that constrained me—I determined to light a spark in this confused, grey life from the remnant of the life force that still remained in me. Therefore I began to write.[8]
[5] When Shen wrote about these events in the late 1920s and 1930s, he always maintained that he went to Guling to recuperate from illness; this story he later admitted was a cover for his actual intentions, which were as I describe them here. See Marián Gálik, Mao Tun and Literary Criticism , p. 154 n. 74. His memoirs do indicate, however, that he fell sick after arriving in Guling. See Wo zouguo de daolu , vol. 1, p. 340.
[6] Mao Dun, "Jiju jiuhua," in Lu Xun et al., Chuangzuo de jingyan , p. 54.
Clearly Mao Dun wrote out of a desire to make sense of the calamity he had experienced and, if possible, to restore his faith in the future of the revolution. He thus drew directly on his experiences in Shanghai and Wuhan over the previous two years for the subject matter of the first two novellas in Eclipse . The models for the love-obsessed female protagonists in "Huanmie"
[9] In his "Jiju jiuhua" (pp. 51–52), Mao Dun identified the three specific encounters with women revolutionaries that inspired "Disillusionment." As he describes them, each of these meetings is infused with a sense of sexual mystery. Take, for example, the first, which occurred in August 1926 as Mao Dun was leaving a political meeting during a torrential rainstorm:
The person walking next to me was one of the women who had attracted my attention. During the meeting, she had talked a great deal, and her face was still flushed with excitement. As we walked, I suddenly felt a surge of "literary inspiration." Had it been possible, I would have grabbed a pen right there and begun to write in the rain.
[10] Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu 2:9.
while writing the third novella in Eclipse , "Zhuiqiu"
These essays, particularly the latter, which presents a "general rebuttal" of the Creation and Sun societies' criticisms in the guise of a defense of Ye Shaojun's novel,[13] give us important clues to Mao Dun's perception of his own creative effort in relation to the work of other May Fourth authors. Mao Dun and Ye Shaojun were friends, colleagues at the Commercial Press, and founding members of the Association for Literary Studies. Ye was one of the few former associates with whom Mao Dun was in contact during his months of hiding in Shanghai, and it was to Ye Shaojun that Mao Dun first showed "Disillusionment" upon its completion.[14] (Ye, then serving as editor in chief of Short Story Magazine , eagerly persuaded Mao Dun to submit the novella for publication.) During the Revolutionary Literature debate, their names were frequently linked by members of the Creation and Sun societies, who accused them both of practicing "naturalism." As we have seen, neither author accepted this designation: Ye Shaojun refused to align himself with any literary doctrine, and Mao Dun had long abandoned his advocacy of the mode. But in "On Reading Ni Huanzhi ," Mao Dun does affirm a shared sense of artistic purpose, however defined, with Ye Shaojun and uses his friend's novel to argue the case for his own fiction. At the same time, as a practicing critic, he is forced to acknowledge certain inadequacies in Ye's novel, and in so doing he enumerates the ideological and formal pitfalls into which
[12] Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu 2:14.
[13] See Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu 2:42: "At the time [of composing 'On Reading Ni Huanzhi '] the stir created by 'From Guling to Tokyo' was already starting to subside, and my new article was intended as a general rebuttal of the critical response to it. I intentionally used Ye Shengtao's Ni Huanzhi for the purpose of this general rebuttal."
practitioners of the novel in a revolutionary period risked stumbling—pitfalls that he clearly hoped to avoid in his own work.
Mao Dun's appraisal of Ni Huanzhi focuses on the notion of a fictional work's shidaixing
[15] See Gálik, Mao Tun and Literary Criticism , pp. 66–67.
finition of the term owes much to Wang Leshan's attempted reconciliation of voluntaristic human effort with a deterministic sense of historical progress (expressed in his wish to "drive the wheels of history with his own hands").
In spite of Ye Shaojun's laudable ambitions, however, Mao Dun finds that several crucial passages of Ni Huanzhi fail to demonstrate the true relationship of individual effort to history as Mao Dun understood it, and this failure results in the several structural flaws that mar the book. There is a discrepancy, for example, between the densely textured first half of the novel, which treats in close detail the narrow issue of Ni's educational reforms, and the more schematic second half, which skims too hastily over his involvement in significant historical events. Mao Dun also regrets that Ye chose to present the May Thirtieth Incident only through Ni Huanzhi's subjective response to it; he should have given a fuller account of the collective base underlying the radical political movement and then described the event "positively and directly." Ye's subjective depiction "causes a slackening in tone, very inappropriate to the tense circumstances of the time."[17] Finally, Mao Dun objects to the apparently "miraculous" change in Jin Peizhang's thinking at the end of the book, which he considers a gratuitous expression of faith in the future for which readers are unprepared. In each case Ye Shaojun was apparently unable to fully overcome the characteristic limitations of May Fourth fiction: specifically, Ye shows a failure of historical imagination by confining himself to the subjective concerns of the troubled bourgeois youth he takes as his protagonist and intellectual laziness in allowing his fiction to become a medium for the expression of personal whims and frustrations. As a result Ye never achieves a truly detached historical perspective.
Mao Dun hoped in his own work to go beyond a personal, and therefore partial, perspective on his epoch; he hoped to make his fiction speak with the full authority of shidaixing , that is, with the voice of history itself. To borrow Erich Auerbach's description of Stendhal's method, he wanted to embed his characters "in a total reality, political, social, economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving."[18] Nevertheless, the criticisms Mao Dun levies against Ye Shaojun could have been—and in fact were—applied to his own early
[17] Ibid., p. 286.
[18] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis , p. 463.
works, particularly the Eclipse trilogy. Although Mao Dun insisted that in at least the first two of his novellas he had simply given an objective description ("as accurate as possible") of the times and "kept his own feelings out,"[19]Eclipse has always been viewed as the most subjective of his writings.[20] The Creationist Qian Xingcun was to use the very terms of Mao Dun's critique of Ni Huanzhi to characterize "Disillusionment": "Structurally the book is divided into two parts. Chapters 1 through 8 concern [the protagonist's] life at school; chapters 9 through 14 concern her life in the revolution. . . . The material covered in the first part is concise and to the point, whereas the latter part is much looser and the material thin."[21] Qian further objected to the "indirect" method with which Mao Dun broaches important historical events: they become a mere backdrop for the characters' personal lives rather than the center of the story itself. Mao Dun was himself to concede the subjective concerns that motivated the composition of "Pursuit": "I acknowledge that the keynote of extreme pessimism was my own, although the young characters' dissatisfactions, their despair, and their search for deliverance were objectively observed realities."[22] It is true that in the composition of Eclipse , Mao Dun had eschewed the autobiographical approach of Ye Shaojun in Ni Huanzhi and rigorously restricted himself to "writing about others"; in defense of his work he seems to say that if his own frustrations were discovered in the psychology of his compatriots as well, they could be identified as objective facts and were therefore acceptable for fictional representation. But Qian Xingcun and others were quick to recognize that Mao Dun's personal disillusionment was the true motivating force behind his composition of "Pursuit."
The compositional problems Mao Dun identifies in "On Reading Ni Huanzhi " had concerned him as a critic long before he began writing fiction. In essays from the early 1920s, such as "On Systemati-
[19] Mao Dun, "Cong Guling dao Dongjing," in Tang Jinhai et al., Mao Dun zhuanji 1:333.
[22] Mao Dun, "Cong Guling dao Dongjing," in Tang Jinhai et al., Mao Dun zhuanji 1:332.
cally and Economically Introducing Western Literary Opinion" and "Naturalism and Modern Chinese Fiction,"[23] Mao Dun had confidently offered a prescription for overriding subjective impediments to aligning the self with historical process. He first urged writers to ground their works in careful observation of the real world and to avoid imitating other literary works. But he went on to advise that an author's observations be "arranged" or "organized" in a purposeful way. Without such arrangement, fictional works present disassembled pictures of the world that "read like account books." Descriptions of the account-book sort were, Mao Dun suggests, the common currency of the popular fiction of the late Qing and early Republican period, where they served only to arouse their readers' cravings for erotic stimulation or scandal—by encouraging, one assumes, a fetishization of the objects described. Only when fictional representation was structured to present a cohesive view of the world informed by strict scientific principles could fiction avoid sensationalism and achieve a comprehensive portrait of society. In examining the writings of such Western realists as Balzac and Zola, Mao Dun was impressed by their encyclopedic treatment of social phenomena: the inclusiveness of their vision was, he felt, an important concomitant of the "scientific" organization of detail. Mao Dun desired, in theory at least, that his novels would be formally capable of accommodating all aspects of Chinese society, from the grossest abstraction to the minutest detail. After Lu Xun's polished miniatures and the restricted scope of Ye Shaojun's "sincere" observations, this urge for comprehensiveness, and the fundamentally novelistic imagination that results from it (and that Mao Dun exhibits even in many of his short stories), must be recognized as something new in modern Chinese literature.[24]
Yet in practice, by calling for the simultaneous exercise of two very different cognitive functions during composition, the one strictly empirical, the other ideological and analytical, Mao Dun's prescription of observation and analysis provided a perplexing model for the would-be realist. In Mao Dun's own writing certain formal irregularities—particularly problems with length and closure—may be seen as vestiges of this struggle to remain faithful both to the integrity of realistic details and to the meaningful structural patterns into which those details were arranged. Though Mao Dun composed many of the period's most highly respected short stories, he frequently complained of his dissatisfaction with them. He wrote of the composition of his first collection of stories, Ye qiangwei
Though Mao Dun never expressed such regrets about his novelistic output, a brief glance at the circumstances surrounding their composition reveals a similar problem with narrative closure. Almost all of Mao Dun's published novels represent scaled-down or fractured versions of the works he originally intended to write. Eclipse was to have
[27] Another reason for Mao Dun's discomfort with short forms was his distaste for the classical Chinese aesthetic, which was predicated on the virtues of conciseness and brevity. In his discussion of Soviet neorealism in "From Guling to Tokyo," he traces its origins to a paper shortage in postrevolutionary Russia that forced authors to compose in a "telegraphic" style, which then became fashionable. Telegraphic writing is inappropriate in China, he argues, both because linguistic compression is inevitably associated with the Chinese classical language and because the Chinese people and their popular culture are naturally verbose. See "Cong Guling dao Dongjing," in Tang Jinhai et al., Mao Dun zhuanji 1:343–44.
been a single narrative about a small group of characters going through different phases of the revolution, but "because I didn't have confidence in my creative power, I divided it into three novellas."[28]Hong
This dilemma reveals itself in Mao Dun's fiction not only formally but thematically as well in the conflict between the ideal and the real, that is, betwen the clarity of structural pattern on the one hand and the refractoriness of an empirically observed social environment on the other. An interesting episode in "Pursuit" gives us some idea how this conflict made itself felt in the process of composition. In it the journalist Wang Zhongzhao
[28] Ibid., p. 333.
of Shanghai nightlife, which he wishes to treat not simply as an exposé but as an illustration of the spiritual confusion of Chinese society. Dutifully he accompanies his dissolute acquaintance Zhang Qiuliu
This episode may serve as a parable of the plight of both journalist and realist—of anyone who attempts a fundamentally representational form of writing. Wang Zhongzhao's journalistic efforts originate in an enforced retreat from political activity, where his actions were governed by received ideological assumptions; journalism will allow him, he hopes, to deal only with concrete and unambiguous realities. His approach to writing is first to delineate a field for research, a problem that he wishes to represent both to himself and his readership in its true light. The problems Wang includes on his list are the staples of journalism and realist fiction alike; they include kidnaping, robbery, rape, strikes, divorce, to all of which he gives the general classification of "social disorders." He then undertakes what he considers an objective investigation of his subject, but at the point of recording the results of that investigation, he discovers to his dismay that even his empirically observed details remain saturated with ideology. With this
[32] Page references are to the 1981 Renmin wenxue chubanshe edition of Shi .
unwelcome reemergence of the ideological, Wang falls silent until less noble motivations—specifically, the thought of his paycheck and the desire to impress his girlfriend—compel him to produce an article that falls far short of his original intentions.
Like Wang Zhongzhao in his journalistic endeavors, Mao Dun undertook the composition of fiction as part of an intended retreat from ideology at a point of frustration with politics and with the resistance of history itself to conform to his ideals. Fiction offered a medium through which Mao Dun could explore the refractory quality of the real world, measuring it against the schematic ideology that had failed him. But as I have suggested above, Mao Dun believed that a balance of observation and interpretation was necessary to fictional composition, and he required a tool for analysis to complement his descriptive intentions. The pen name he chose when he published "Disillusionment" suggests that the notion of "contradiction" served this purpose for him. On one level the word simply gave expression to the profound sense of bafflement and indignation he felt after the setbacks of 1927. On another level, however, the term carried its own ideological connotations and, indirectly, a message of hope. With it, Mao Dun was clearly invoking the Marxist-Hegelian plotting of world history, whereby historical progress proceeds through the successive resolutions of such contradictions as he had observed in Chinese society. Each time Mao Dun employs the term contradiction in the Eclipse trilogy—and there are many such references—one senses that he is using it to reduce the complexities of the social environment to comprehensible or "typical" forces. The promise is held out that once these forces are understood, it should be possible to recognize the true direction in which history is moving and then point a way out of the present political (and psychological) impasse. By the logic of dialectics, the horrific collision of social forces in China must eventually give way to a harmonizing "synthesis." Through the notion of contradiction, then, Mao Dun attempts to communicate both a sense of the comprehensiveness of his social observations and an awareness of the dynamic process of historical change—the very factors by which he judged whether a work of fiction had achieved a true understanding of history, or shidaixing . But if we accept Mao Dun's rather bald invitation to read the novellas in Eclipse with the Hegelian dialectic in mind, we shall discover that the configuration of contradictions that make up his fictional world retain some distinctly non-Hegelian
features and that they again and again fail to facilitate the hopeful resolutions they promise.
Mao Dun's early works are clearly constructed around certain binary oppositions. In none of his works are they more evident than in "Disillusionment," where Mao Dun's allegorical method of naming characters is only the first evidence of the novel's geometry of human relationships. The names of the two primary female characters, Hui
Baosu
The consummation of the seduction is suppressed, both textually and in Jing's psyche: she swoons, and remembers the event only as a "pleasant dream," although her later discovery of Baosu's hypocrisy brings on a temporary illness. In terms of narrative development, however, the episode does appear to free Jing to move to another stage of development (specifically, involvement in revolutionary politics) and clearly dispels what tension existed in the specific opposition of Hui and Jing as characters. But the dualism implicit in that relationship is not resolved but rather relocated in Jing's personal psychology. The text had earlier alerted us to the possibility of such a psychologization: "I'm not afraid of the outer world's lack of tranquillity [jing ]; I only fear I can't calm my heart" (6). After the seduction scene, the vague feeling of vexation Jing had earlier felt becomes a clearly defined internal war between disappointment and hope. One side of her split psyche argues that "every hope results in disappointment, and every beautiful longing is ugly at heart," while the other encourages her: "Without hope, what is the meaning of life? . . . It is not disappointment that is painful but a life without hope or purpose!" (54). And indeed, the short time Jing spends in Wuhan, depicted in chapters 9 through 11 of the novella, is characterized by extreme fluctuations of emotional highs and lows. She is "moved to tears" at the assembly of revolutionary forces in chapter 9, but the day-to-day "sloganeering" of revolutionary work bores her. She is most troubled, however, by the hedonism that characterizes life among the revolutionaries in Wuhan:
her comrades seem trapped in cycles of "tension" and "exhaustion," i.e. between periods of feverish engagement in political and sexual activity and periods when they succumb to feelings of pessimism and despair. In this "contradictory" environment Jing grows ill and despondent, and what hope she still has for the revolution seems to ebb. Her women friends—identifying her once again with a passive, pitying role—recommend she take a job as a nurse at the mountain resort of Guling.
In the final section of the novella, a new dyadic opposition is explored in Jing's relationship with one of the soldiers under her care. In this new dichotomy, the soldier Qiang Meng
[34] See Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu 2:4–6.
ideology than an aesthetic doctrine, and Mao Dun clearly intended Qiang Meng to be understood not as an activist but as an artist of revolution: he approaches the revolution as pure experience and is completely disinterested in its social rationale.
Jing again plays the quiescent element of the pair. Her naturalism is a passive doctrine of resignation, but it too is the consequence of disillusionment (both with her earlier experiences with Baosu and with her political activities). Once again, Jing's feeling of pity for the wounded male allows and determines the relationship. And once again, no real conflict develops from the opposition between the two characters: during the course of their relationship we come to understand that his futurism and her naturalism are in fact mutually defining and interdependent creeds. As she puts it, "His futurism was nothing but a countercheck to an extreme form of tragic pessimism" (84). As futurist and naturalist, Qiang and Jing are halves who become whole only by recognizing the inevitability of their opposition. Without that recognition they are "wounded," Qiang in the heart (his "left breast"), Jing in the will. Their brief commingling results in a relationship based not on a dynamic synthesis of their opposing views of the world but rather on a recognition of their views' inevitable coexistence and alternation. Significantly, however, their relationship is played out in an environment removed from the ordinary affairs of the world and is soon dissolved when Qiang Meng is called back to the war. Before he leaves, Qiang consoles Jing by saying that he has disavowed futurism: "Didn't you tell me that futurism admires only force but neglects to ask whether the use of force is just? You've persuaded me!" (96–97). But even after this we are told that "Jing's powers of reason and Qiang's emotions struggled on in the dark" (97), and the future holds only a weak promise of success (or even survival) for the two lovers. At the close of "Disillusionment," Jing is left once again in the company of her women friends, feeling as if she has been awakened out of a "great dream."
Both of the romantic encounters that constitute the narrative kernel of the novella have thus been reduced in Jing's imagination to dreams. The contradictions that the text explores through these relationships have not led to any productive resolution nor even to any lasting consequences at the level of plot. Mao Dun acknowledges as much in his discussion of "Disillusionment" in the essay "From Guling to Tokyo," where he says the novella explores precisely the alternation of "un-
ending seeking and unending disillusionment" in the protagonist's psychology.[35] Jing's hopes are inevitably dashed by the mechanisms of the plot, but just as inevitably her disappointments generate new hopes. Though superficially offering a linear plot line, the novel is constructed around a series of alternating polarities, variously defined as innocence and experience, hope and disappointment, naturalism and futurism. Instead of placing these polarities in dynamic opposition, Mao Dun has preferred to set them in temporal conjunction and explore their interdependence as mutually defining conceptual spheres. Mao Dun's contradictions thus come to be understood less as conflicts inhering in the real world—or even in the social order given representation in the text—than as conflicting perspectives on an ever-elusive reality. Such oppositions resist pragmatic resolution; one can at best momentarily rob them of their agonistic quality through the subjective exercise of pity.
Mao Dun's handling of contradictions thus fails to generate a dynamic sense of historical progression and would even seem, from this description, to have more in common with traditional Chinese attitudes toward dyadic oppositions (as in the familiar opposition of yin and yang) than with the Marxist-Hegelian dialectic Mao Dun espoused. But the recurring alternation between binary poles in "Disillusionment" does not provide the philosophical consolation of the yin-yang dualism; instead one discovers in the characters' psychological response to the contradictions a distinctly modern sense of alienation and anxiety. All the commotion of the novella's plot comes to seem, in C. T. Hsia's words, a "caricature of purposeful action,"[36] and in the end the reader's attention is directed away from outer realities to Jing's psychological fluctuations.[37] In nearly all of Mao Dun's early novels there occur scenes where primary characters are suddenly overwhelmed by their disordered, chaotic perceptions of the external world—moments in which the social contradictions sketched in the external world are violently resituated in the subjectivity of the protagonist. Jing in "Disillusionment," Fang Luolan
[35] Mao Dun, "Cong Guling dao Dongjing," in Tang Jinhai et al., Mao Dun zhuanji 1:336.
[36] C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction , p. 143.
[37] Jaroslev Prusek[*] has also observed this movement from objective description to psychological exploration, which results in a weakening of the line of action in Mao Dun's fiction. See "Mao Tun and Yü Ta-fu," in his The Lyrical and the Epic .
Wang Zhongzhao in "Pursuit," and Wu Sunfu
[38] See Perry Link, Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies , especially pp. 196–235.
[39] See Yu-shih Chen, Realism and Allegory , chapters 3 through 5. Chen's argument seems to me persuasive only in part. She is surely correct, for example, to interpret the meeting described in chapter 5 of "Disillusionment," where a group of students discuss and eventually condemn a triangular love affair, as an allegorical representation of the Communist party's debate over its alliance with the Nationalist party. But if the entire trilogy is intended, as she suggests, as an extended allegory of the "collective experience of the Chinese Communist movement" (with certain characters representing specific contingents within the party—Hui, the collaborationist faction; Jing, the faction believing in self-determination, and so forth), this judgment at the very least undercuts her high evaluation of the literary merit of the trilogy. For as a schematic allegory, even with the help of Yu-shih Chen's key, Eclipse seems murky and inconsistent. I believe that Mao Dun may have flirted with such allegorizing in parts of "Disillusionment" but that the trilogy best reveals its strengths when read as a work of psychological realism. We need not view the incidents in the novel as simply anecdotal, however. Realism always traffics in types, and Mao Dun clearly intends his characters to represent the general trends and attitudes that characterized Chinese society during the "great revolution." Mao Dun may even have intended us to equate these trends and attitudes to some extent with the policies of specific parties or factions (for example, the cynicism Hui embodies may indeed have characterized a certain faction of the Communist party). But the characters are not simply emblematic of those parties and factions; that is, they do not stand in for them in an overarching political allegory.
tions in the much more powerfully articulated dyadic relationship of Jing and Hui. In "Vacillation," the second novella of the Eclipse trilogy, however, triangularity is brought to center stage.
At the most superficial level "Vacillation" concerns a love triangle, involving the protagonist, Fang Luolan; his wife, Meili
[40] Mao Dun, Hong , p. 228.
third, free element, undermines the fixed and mutually reaffirming identity of such alternating dyadic poles as those we observed in "Disillusionment."
Fang's inability to choose between the two women is symptomatic, of course, of the vacillation of the novella's title and of a general lack of self-knowledge. The latter manifests itself with more serious social consequences in Fang's waffling political behavior when, as the local Nationalist party representative, he is called upon to resolve the two major political disputes depicted in the novella. Each dispute concerns the village's response to a threatened uprising (in the first case by disgruntled store employees, in the second by local peasants), and significantly each is characterized by a triangular division of political forces in the village. Though the alignment of interests differs slightly in the two cases, the underlying division of power in the village is among (1) the forces commanded by Hu Guoguang
When Fang Luolan observed how enraged they were, he felt uncomfortable. He mumbled a few perfunctory words, but he could offer no definite answer. When it came to these practical problems, what right did he have to give a definite answer? Of course, he should at least have his own opinion, and there was nothing to stop him from expressing it. But somehow he felt powerless even to determine what his opinion should be. (163)
In failing to act, Fang cedes his power to Hu Guoguang, and the outcome in both cases is a brutal purge. In the end Fang is forced to recognize the harmful consequences of his vacillation: during the riot that erupts at the end of the novella he has a nightmarish vision in
which the eyes of the slain stare at him "as if awaiting a reply," and he hears a voice intoning, "You wanted freedom but got tyranny" (249). In his political life, as in his romantic relationships, freedom offers choices that may simply induce hesitation; in the space of that hesitation other, less scrupulous individuals rush in to seize control.
To this point, we have viewed the romantic and the political strands of the novella's plot as separate but parallel illustrations of the dangers of triangularity. But the two lines of plot development (and, more generally, the two spheres of human activity they treat) are repeatedly conjoined, often to ironical effect, as in the scene in chapter 6 where Sun Wuyang sings the "Internationale" while boldly flirting with the party leader, Lin Zichong
If eroticism plays an increasingly intrusive role in public discourse in "Vacillation," its encroachment into the individual psyche is even more insidious, as Fang Luolan's interior monologues repeatedly demonstrate. When we first meet Fang, he is indulging in an extravagant daydream in which he sees the figure of Sun Wuyang bedecked with
sparkling stars and fireworks. Later, similar reveries overwhelm him at crucial moments, hindering his ability to concentrate on the political problems it is his responsibility to solve. He later recognizes that his preoccupation with Sun Wuyang is in a sense the cause of the village's troubles: his "strange romance" with her has caused him to neglect public affairs, "allowing Hu Guoguang, who we knew from the start to be unreliable, to monopolize the authority of the party" (220). What would seem to be harmless, private fantasies thus incur terrible, public consequences. Fang's erotic life and indeed his subjectivity as a character is revealed in the terms of the novel as an excess—of desires, of choices, of possibilities—that at first inspires in him a fleeting sense of freedom. In the end, however, the choices blur his perception of reality and cripple his performance as an actor in events of public significance. Such at least is the judgment of Li Ke
The excess of choices that troubled Fang's private world creates in the broader social world a new potential for hypocrisy and for promiscuous interchanges, and it is this danger that is explored in the character of Hu Guoguang. In sharp contrast to Fang, Hu welcomes the new environment and acts decisively to profit from it: as introduced at the beginning of the novel, he is "full of plans," "an old fox of long standing" who is adept at adjusting his schemes as the circumstances and the times demand. A skillful rhetorician, he readily adopts what-
[41] Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu 2:9.
ever ideological stance serves his private advantage. He was the first in the village to cut off his pigtail, the sign of China's submission to the Manchus, and now recognizing the imminent arrival of the revolutionaries, he promptly decides to join ranks with them. Even his personal name is subject to alteration: when he joins the revolutionary cause, he changes it from the feudal Guofu
Unlike Hu Guoguang, Fang Luolan continues to believe that political rhetoric should be more than an instrument of the individual's will to power, that it should in fact offer an objective and verifiable explanation of human relations. He finds himself, however, unable to discriminate among the diverse ideologies and creeds of the villagers, just as he is unable to choose between the charms of Sun Wuyang and his wife. Confronted with an excess of choices, he retains his nostalgic conviction that among these alternatives there must be a right one, if only he knew how to identify it. Fang is thus unable to achieve a binding linguistic representation of the world, yet at the same time he remains unwilling to embrace the arbitrariness of human relations in a society where name and reality do not necessarily correspond. Whereas Hu Guoguang is willing to assume the hypocrisy endemic to a world dominated by triangular relationships, Fang wishes to remain true to his word.
In the final novella in the Eclipse trilogy, "Pursuit," Mao Dun goes on to explore individual responses to a promiscuous social order in which political rhetoric has been effectively discredited. All of the novella's primary characters were, like Mao Dun himself, participants
in the failed 1927 revolution and are said to suffer from the disease of the times
The journalist Wang Zhongzhao shares Zhang Manqing's belief that his generation has courted disillusionment with its exaggerated idealism. He too decides to resign himself to reality and pursue a more modest ambition through his career in journalism. But as I have shown above, he too has problems finding material for his articles; the facts he finds seem invariably to dissolve as he arranges them for composi-
tion. He soon comes to wonder if his profession is not simply the transmission of rumors (288). In both cases, limited efforts to contribute to social progress come perversely to retard it, and the educator and the journalist feel themselves more and more out of step with history and ever more deeply trapped in disillusionment. Zhang Manqing and Wang Zhongzhao share more than their retreat from politics, however: both have redirected a measure of their former idealism onto their romantic life. Both choose fiancées whom they describe as feminine ideals, and both eagerly anticipate the refuge from public life that marriage will provide. But these dreams too are destined for disappointment: once Zhang Manqing has married, his wife proves as "shallow, mean, and petty" as his friend Zhang Qiuliu had predicted; and Wang Zhongzhao's romantic ideals are shattered even before he reaches the altar by his fiancée's disfigurement in an accident.
The futility of such efforts to redirect or contain a frustrated idealism is perceived most clearly by the nihilists Shi Xun
Zhang Qiuliu's flirtatiousness places her, like Hui and Sun Wuyang, in the category of experienced women. But she shows as well a profound capacity for pity that is reminiscent of the innocent Jing. This comes to the fore primarily in her relationship with the syphilitic Shi Xun, whom she nurses in the hospital when others have abandoned him. She makes it her cause to "remake" him, to resuscitate his will to live. But this project, despite its origins in her feelings of com-
passion, proves as misguided as Wang Zhongzhao's and Zhang Manqing's careerism: the night of lovemaking she enjoys with Shi Xun only hastens his death and introduces the spirochete into her own body. Syphilis proves more powerful than Qiuliu's mission of mercy; her pity has no power to counter its effect but simply provides a vector for its transmission. Venereal disease serves as the novella's most powerful metaphor for the contagious efficacy of disillusionment. Once Qiuliu is infected, the contagion reveals the full strength of its destructive power, for she is, at least metaphorically, at the center of all the characters' remaining hopes. Each of the men finds himself fascinated with her, and the women whom Manqing and Zhongzhao have chosen as ideal mates resemble her so closely that even their lovers confuse their identities (356, 360). The concluding event of the novel—the arrival of a telegram announcing the disfigurement of Zhongzhao's fiancée—marks the defacement of the text's last emblem of wholeness and seems to represent the collaboration of fate itself in Qiuliu's destructive flirtatiousness. In the final scene of the novella Zhongzhao is left holding in one hand a photo of his fiancée's smiling face and in the other the telegram announcing its disfigurement. This "last blow of fate" (430) puts an end to Zhongzhao's fond hope that he could ever, even through the practice of the strictest pragmatism, exert power over the Real.
Of the characters in "Pursuit," Zhang Qiuliu and Shi Xun exhibit most clearly the symptoms of shidaibing . They proudly deny the controlling power of time in their lives; during their night of lovemaking "they forgot the past and no longer worried about the future." But syphilis, the somatic equivalent of their spiritual malaise, by establishing an unwelcome connection between their past sexual behavior and present physical condition, serves as a powerful reminder of temporal continuity: as Qiuliu imagines it, "the tail of the black shadow of the past insisted on projecting itself onto the body of the present" (400). By refusing to recognize the power of history, the two remain bound to a view of the world that is just as fractured and partial as that professed by Manqing and Zhongzhao.
A similar inability to comprehend the whole of historical and social necessity afflicts the protagonist of Mao Dun's lengthiest and most famous novel, Midnight . Wu Sunfu, a powerful industrialist and a nationalist who hopes to win back the Chinese economy from foreign control by building up a strong national industry, appears to be in a
much better position to command his social environment than the failed revolutionaries of "Pursuit." But his desire to rebuild his home village of Shuangqiao
But we recall that Midnight presents a significantly scaled-down version of the novel Mao Dun had intended to write. In his memoirs Mao Dun gives a detailed summary of his original plan for the novel. He writes that his thinking at the time he began composition in 1930 was heavily influenced by a contemporary debate over the nature of Chinese society. As Mao Dun characterizes it, the debate was dominated by three schools of opinion: (1) the revolutionary faction, which held that China under Jiang Jieshi remained a semifeudal, semicolonial society and called for a revolution led by the proletariat, (2) the Trotskyites, who maintained that China was already "traveling the capitalist road" and that Chinese capitalists should take the lead in expelling
[42] Mao Dun, Ziye . Page numbers refer to the 1975 Hong Kong reprint published by Nanguo chubanshe. My translations are adapted from the near-complete English rendition by Hsu Meng-hsiang and A. C. Barnes.
colonialism and feudalism from China, and (3) advocates of "national capitalism," who wished to see the suppression of both communism and colonialism in China, followed by the establishment of an independent capitalist society on the model of Western Europe and the United States. Mao Dun writes that Midnight was specifically intended as a rebuttal to the Trotskyites and the national capitalists: "China was not traveling the capitalist road; but under the exploitation of colonial and feudal powers, allied with the bureaucrat-compradore class, China was sinking deeper into a semicolonial, semifeudal condition."[43] In a more general sense, Mao Dun hoped to paint a contrasting picture of the "white city," where the colonial and feudal powers lorded over the urban proletariat, and the "red country," where peasants were beginning to assert themselves with the support of the Communist party.
As Mao Dun worked on the novel, however, he recognized that its scope was simply too broad and began deleting the sections that were to treat the rural peasantry. As the text now stands, only chapter 4 is set in the countryside, and its focus is on the rural gentry; the peasants appear only as an undifferentiated, vengeful crowd. Their effective absence means that the novel can only claim to present the society of Shanghai—not all of Chinese society—in miniature. Curiously, too, the people Mao Dun identifies as the ultimate villains of modern Chinese history, the Western imperialists, who had made Shanghai the largest foreign concession in the country, are present only as a vague threat at the borders of the narrative. Midnight thus fails to give representation to the two crucial forces determining the historical course of China in the 1930s—that is, to the forces that Mao Dun must have recognized as the fundamental poles of the historical dialectic. As a result the Shanghai of the novel is cut off from the true dynamics of the historical moment. Belonging neither to the old world (feudal China) nor to the new (revolutionary rural China), the city is a contained, dead place where all activity is stillborn and unproductive. The events of the novel are little more than pseudo events: the central conflict of the plot, the strike in Wu Sunfu's silk factory, leads of necessity to a stalemate. Wu Sunfu, a national capitalist trying desperately to stem the tide of the imperialist economic
[43] Mao Dun, Wo zouguo de daolu 2:92.
takeover, is not the true enemy of the workers, nor are they, members of China's tiny urban proletariat, the true standard-bearers of revolutionary change in China.
But if from the ultimate perspective of history Shanghai is unproductive, it is anything but inactive. On the contrary, it is the locus of a maximum concentration of energy. The opening paragraph of Midnight describes a huge neon sign that looms over the city, proclaiming in English "LIGHT, HEAT, POWER." The city's economic energy comes, however, not from productive labor (the actual sources of production—the factories and farms—are in total disarray), but rather from the pure fluidity of funds within the city. The one thing Shanghai has no shortage of is money. In the "speculation fever" (39) that has contaminated the city, money is the sole object of nearly everyone's pursuit, yet as one character says, "There is plenty of cash in Shanghai; nobody can say money's tight" (42). Economic life in the city does not simply entail the accrual of funds. The nature of money is to be exchanged, and the pleasure of possessing it resides precisely in its potential transmission. The pursuit of wealth inevitably draws the seeker into the market, and in the overheated economic environment of Shanghai, one can maintain riches only by venturing them.
The same metaphors—of fever and reckless transmission—that characterize Shanghai's economic life are applied in the novel to the sexual pursuits of its citizens. Old Mr. Wu, the family patriarch who comes from the country to visit Shanghai in the first chapter, is overwhelmed by the erotic environment of the city. The city streets appear to him like a spinning "kaleidoscope" of color and sound (9), and his family's drawing room, to which he is brought, seems to be "filled with countless swelling bosoms, bosoms that bobbed and quivered and danced around him" (14). The old man quickly expires of what the doctor pronounces to be "overexcitement," a death that clearly symbolizes the demise of the old China. But the young people who come to the city (of whom Wu Sunfu's sister, Huifang
cendo of desire in the city. In becoming mistress to the speculator Zhao Botao
Wu Sunfu suffers a process of character erosion similar to that we observed with Fang Luolan in "Vacillation." His noble ambition to revive China's economy is gradually subverted by the twin temptations of Shanghai's speculation fever and its free-floating eroticism. The two contend within his brain, each interfering with the function of the other. Frustrated with business, he alleviates his stress by raping an innocent maid; but when trying to concentrate on professional matters, he falls prey to disjointed erotic fantasies: "No matter how he tried, he just could not concentrate, especially when the memory of Liu Yuying's inviting smile, her lovely voice, and her limpid eyes kept hammering away at his brain and distracting him as he tried to wrestle with his business problems" (355). As politics was infected by sex in "Vacillation," so the financial world—and the psyches of its captains—is contaminated in Midnight .
Although Wu Sunfu is unable to integrate the erotic and economic spheres of his life, the novel brings the two together cogently in the woman of his daydreams, Liu Yuying. In a scene early in the novel, when she is still playing the role of Zhao Botao's mistress, Liu Yuying overhears Zhao discussing his plans to manipulate the market. Realizing the importance of this information, she goes to sell her "secret retail" at the stock market, which is described as an erotic battlefield, "suffocating, and reeking with sweat" (317). Her possession of this secret, whose revelation would render the frenzied activity she observes around her meaningless, gives her a distinctly sexual pleasure:
When Liu Yuying looked down and saw that her dress of pale blue gauze was soaked with sweat and that her nipples showed through as two round, rosy blurs, she could not help smiling. How comical it all was, she thought. . . . All these men here were fighting in the dark and she alone knew what was going on: what an immense joke it all was! (318)
But only the potential revelation of the secret makes it powerful, and to prolong her enjoyment, she proceeds to conduct what can only be called a flirtation with the speculator Feng Yunqing
Liu Yuying's secret, so eagerly sought by the speculators in the novel, is the sort of enigma that frequently serves as a plot motivator in realist fiction. It offers one explanation for the feverish activity in Shanghai, that is, the specific mode of manipulation used by the powerful speculator Zhao Botao to control the market. But this secret is very different in kind from that which, we recall, the novel as a whole purports to harbor: the answer to the riddle of Chinese society itself. The first secret is particularistic and partial and is taken possession of with a sense of erotic fascination, almost as though it had temporarily intruded itself physically into the knower's body. It acquires value only through a ritual of concealment and revelation; upon transmission its value is spent and only a new secret may replace it. Mao Dun's sought-for truth is, on the other hand, comprehensive, manifest, and communal. It is knowledge that is not possessed by the individual or the individual text but contains and structures the entire social order, indeed, all of history. The madness of the capitalistic social order depicted in Midnight is its fetishization of the transmissible object, which occludes a broader vision of the interdependence of all objects in the natural world. But secrets and details, the currency of the realist novel, appear themselves to be subject to the rules of the transmission of objects in capitalist society. The novel, in its possession of details, temporarily elevates the described object above the other materials of a disassembled world, and this elevation threatens to de-center the larger, analytical structure of the fictional world.
Mao Dun labored, through both the scale and the artifice of his fiction, to reconcile the detail to the structure and the individual to history. His "ornate, literary" style,[44] which caused several early cri-
[44] C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction , p. 165.
tics to complain that his works moved too slowly and bogged down in description,[45] is in part a reflection of this labor. It is as though he hoped to integrate the detail into the larger structure by explicitly drawing out its relations to all other elements of the represented world in a series of ever-broadening concentric spheres. But his problems with length and closure suggest that the sought-for exterior sphere that would encase the world of the fiction as a meaningful whole and place all its parts in just proportion remained an elusive goal. Finally, the realist novel must take its place within the capitalist drift, a necessity Mao Dun recognized and resisted. At the end of Midnight , when Wu Sunfu decides in a fit of hysterics to leave for Guling "to have a look at this Red Army that everybody's so afraid of" (549), the text itself seems to recognize the tenuous historical moment on the eve of revolution that permits its appearance. Unable to fully equate realist fiction with history, Mao Dun appears to court the extinction of the very mode of fiction he had so effectively promulgated.
Zhang Tianyi:
Fiction as Social Performance
The fiction of Zhang Tianyi, recognized by many critics as "the most brilliant short-story writer" China produced during the 1930s,[46] offers an interesting counterpoint to the fundamentally novelistic impulses that underlay Mao Dun's oeuvre. Although, as I shall show, the fictional output of the two authors must in the end be judged radically dissimilar in tone and structure, they shared a number of important presuppositions about literature. Not the least of these was a persistent theoretical commitment to realism: calls for truth and reality in fiction recur like a litany throughout Zhang's critical writings. In 1933, in a humorous account of his career entitled "A Tale of Writing," Zhang told how, upon learning that the realist school was out of fashion, he tried writing more modish works in the style of the "School of Incomprehensibility." But the results were unsatisfactory:
[46] C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction , p. 212.
Originally I had hoped to build an ivory tower, but ivory proved too expensive, so I had to make do with cow bones. But where was I to place this cow-bone tower? The city was filled with gunfire from the May Thirtieth and March Eighteenth atrocities, and the countryside was as always teeming with calamities, both man-made and heaven-sent. No matter where I looked, I still found myself in the real world.
Acknowledging failure, I had no choice but to step out of my cow-bone tower and try writing about real events in the real world.[47]
Like earlier realists, Zhang insisted that his literary product had an intimate connection with the external social environment. But as he frequently pointed out, his sense of realism conditioned not only the content of his stories but his style as well: "Since I was going to write about real events, I felt I had to use real language, language that would be understandable to everyone."[48]
As is clear from the passage about the cow-bone tower, Zhang Tianyi perceived the real world as an arena of conflict. And like Mao Dun, Zhang regularly employed dialectical thinking to make sense of its contradictions. His reliance on this method is already evident in a brief 1932 essay entitled "On the Lack of Vigor in Composition: Its Reasons and Its Cure," an article whose earnest tone contrasts sharply with the jocularity of "A Tale of Writing." Contemporary writers, he wrote, themselves embodied a poignant contradiction:
The majority are petty bourgeois intellectuals. The times have forced them to recognize that the class to which they belong has reached a dead end, so they strive to rid their writings of individualism and redefine themselves as part of the collective. On the one hand they have already abandoned (or partially abandoned) the individualistic lyricism of the old literature, as well as its focus on trivial personal affairs, but on the other hand they have not yet fully grasped the new consciousness. Their works as a result seem extremely impoverished.[49]
Zhang's solution for this problem recalls Mao Dun's argument about
[48] Zhang Tianyi, "Chuangzuo de gushi," in Zhang Tianyi, Zhang Tianyi wenxue pinglun ji , p. 306.
the dual need for analysis and observation. A work of literature, Zhang wrote, has a double source, the author's "thought" and the author's "life experience." Literature emerges from the fusion of these two, but each of these elements is itself to be understood dialectically. Ideologically, Zhang called for authors to submit to a kind of "theoretical cultivation" whose base was the "scientific dialectic." Only through "correctly and firmly grasping the dialectic" can authors overcome "the remnants of the old consciousness within themselves." Experientially, Zhang called for a new confrontation of the author's self with the collective: "All new writers should leave their windows and writing desks and enter the broad society of workers, peasants, and soldiers."[50]
Fiction writing, in this formula, entails an active purging of the self-involvement that, Zhang felt, marred earlier May Fourth literature. Like Mao Dun, Zhang Tianyi took as axiomatic a definition of the author as first and foremost an observer of others.[51] Both Mao Dun and Zhang spoke with contempt of authors who wrote only about the "trivial contingent affairs"
The one exception to this rule in Zhang Tianyi's oeuvre is his first work of fiction to receive serious attention, "San tian ban de meng"
[50] Zhang Tianyi, "Chuangzuo bu zhen zhi yuanyin ji qi chulu," in Zhang Tianyi, Zhang Tianyi wenxue pinglun ji , p. 6.
story to refer overtly to his personal affairs, "A Three and a Half Day's Dream" may be interpreted as a metaphorical purging of the author's autobiographical impulses. In the story, through a series of letters to a friend, the narrator describes his departure from X (by which letter he designates the city in which he presently lives and works) to make a reluctant filial visit to Hangzhou
The narrative situation in "A Three and a Half Day's Dream" parallels Zhang Tianyi's own life story.[53] Zhang was born in Nanjing, but during his childhood his family moved several times. His father, who was a teacher, finally settled the family in Hangzhou. In the mid-1920s Zhang studied for a brief time at an art school in Shanghai and then went north to attend Beijing University. He entered a science program there because at the time he "felt that there were so many irresolvable problems in the world (relating to life, the revolution, and love) that I could see no practical value in the literary arts." At heart, however,
"my interests still lay with literature."[54] After only a year of study, Zhang grew tired of his science classes and dropped out of the university. During his stay in Beijing, however, he had been exposed not only to new literary trends but also to a variety of radical political ideas, including Marxism. In 1927 Zhang returned south to undertake a series of temporary jobs (as teacher, office worker, and journalist) and to begin writing in earnest. While living in Shanghai, he received the encouragement of Lu Xun and met other important figures of the New Literature movement. Lu Xun and Yu Dafu themselves encouraged Zhang to publish "A Three and a Half Day's Dream" in the journal Benliu
In 1927 Zhang's father retired, leaving his family in poverty. Zhang's classmate Zhou Songdi
[54] Zhang Tianyi, "Zuojia zishu," p. 276.
The feelings between [Zhang] and his father were quite deep. The old man thoroughly loved his son. In the letters he sent Tianyi, he would always write some humorous phrase at the end, like "As many as the bamboo shoots after a spring rain" or "As many as the threads of rain during a fall shower," and would never repeat himself. . . . [Tianyi] explained, "He means his kisses are as abundant as bamboo shoots after a spring rain." "Zhang Tianyi he Xianshi wenxue ji qita"
(Zhang Tianyi and Realist Literature , etc.), in Shen, Huang, and Wu, Zhang Tianyi yanjiu ziliao , pp. 91–94, here p. 93.
personal life at the time he wrote it. Nevertheless, in the context of Zhang's literary development, it is the story's unique—and finally dismissive—treatment of such autobiographical details that is remarkable. The contingent affairs of one's personal life, the conclusion suggests, may in the context of one's family life possess a compelling sense of reality, but this is an illusion: it is finally one's independent work in the larger society that aligns the self with the Real. "A Three and a Half Day's Dream" thus constitutes a definitive evacuation of the personal preoccupations from which such authors as Ye Shaojun labored for years to disengage themselves. The impatience the narrator of the story feels with his family's inconsequential gossip mirrors Zhang's irritation with the triviality of much contemporary writing, and the narrator's final pledge hints at Zhang's own resolve to produce a fiction unfettered by overt self-reference.
Zhang Tianyi's reception as an important newcomer on the literary scene in the early 1930s was occasioned not simply by his avoidance of autobiography, however, but also by his disparaging attitude toward the vacillations of young bourgeois intellectuals. In 1931 Feng Naichao
Feng Naichao's observation notwithstanding, many of Zhang's early stories do feature disappointed lovers and disaffected intellec-
tuals; it is less Zhang's choice of subject matter than his treatment of these figures that distinguishes him from earlier writers. Where previously the spiritual infirmities of such characters were explored with a measure of authorial sympathy, in Zhang's works they are generally the target of an uninhibited mockery. Zhang's intellectual characters do not vacillate out of pure intellectual frustration; more often than not they recognize that political engagement offers a way out of their private contradictions, but they lack the courage or resolution to alter their behavior. The protagonist of "Zhuchangzi de beiai"
The times are simply too powerful—so powerful that I no longer dare write. If I am asked to write about fine wine and women or to compose a tribute to decadence or to relate a few trivialities from my present life, I can do so without any trouble in a way that will entice readers. But the times do not permit such compositions; they force me to write something new. Unfortunately my life, my consciousness, my education, in short, everything about me, is still of the old style. (226)
As Pig Guts later acknowledges, he is unable to "resolve the contradictions" of his life, having grown too accustomed to the pleasures of his old "life-style," which revolves largely around drinking and socializing at dance halls and cafes.
Pig Guts several times invokes the times (shidai ) and contradictions (maodun ), notions that I suggested above were of serious concern to Mao Dun. But in Zhang's stories they are less substantive ideas than fashionable slogans, whose repetition serves ironically to screen the characters from changing social realities. The protagonist of "Jing Ye xiansheng"
The pain he suffered was undoubtedly of a very modern kind . . . but he was hard put to say precisely what caused it. You might say it was the pain of vacillation. But that didn't express it exactly. For although he felt a measure of real discomfort, what he called his decadence did not really arise from his thinking anything in particular. It was more a matter of his fearing that life was becoming too drab and ordinary, of his craving a bit of stimulation. . . . But—if we may employ the conjunction here one more time—in the end he didn't have a clue to what motivated his own behavior. (39–40)
The narration here satirically underlines the self-canceling nature of Jing Ye's vacillations by calling attention to the repeated use of the adversative but in his interior monologue. Unlike the vacillations of intellectuals in Lu Xun's stories or in Mao Dun's Eclipse , Jing Ye's anxiety is less a frustrated response to historical exigencies than it is a complement to the character's romantic self-image. Jing Ye's friend Lao Hui
To expose the shallowness of Jing Ye's vacillation, Zhang has him confront a radical alter ego in the person of an acquaintance named Ge Ping
heard of Jing Ye's new life: some say that he has reverted to a life of decadence, some that he continues to struggle to rehabilitate himself, and others that he has taken a wife and become a successful businessman. Although these reports are "contradictory to the point of absurdity," Lao Hui contends that "they are all possible" (46). The friends depart, feeling puzzled.
This ending reflects in part Zhang's uncertainty about the prospects of reform for such intellectuals as Jing Ye, but more importantly it subverts readers' expectations of fictional closure. It makes Jing Ye's character an assemblage of possibilities rather than an integrated personality, thus destroying the consistency of characterization that readers expect from realist fiction. But Zhang Tianyi is less interested in producing a static portrait of intellectuals like Jing Ye than in exploring moral choices. The story's open-ended conclusion functions as a defamiliarization technique, disallowing a simple cathartic response to the story and forcing readers to take a moral stand, both for Jing Ye and for themselves. In approaching his characters in this way, Zhang rejects the reflectionism of conventional realism—which entails passively delineating the representative characteristics of individuals and social groupings—for a more activist fiction that explores the potential for change. The conclusion is, in short, Zhang Tianyi's formal means of choosing Ge Ping's path over Jing Ye's.
Defamiliarization techniques abound in Zhang Tianyi's early ficton, especially in his first two novels, Guitu riji
fiction writing that seem designed to point out the shortcomings of the realism Mao Dun practiced: he advised that fictional scenes be developed rapidly, that characters be revealed through action rather than psychological description, and that descriptions of objects and scenery be kept as brief as possible.[62]
The text of Cogwheel makes these same points through a series of satirical asides. At various points the narrator baldly announces the text's resistance to metaphor ("Some people said his mouth was a bit like . . . well, we won't try to find a comparison but just say straight out that his lips seemed a bit thin" [22]), to physical description ("To describe a person, there's no need to get wordy and go into all these details; I'm just trying to tell you her shoulders were a bit crooked" [23]), to disquisitions on psychology ("If you must have some psychological description here, the author can tell you" [37]), and to the treatment of romantic themes ("I really can't tell love stories—I start stuttering. If the reader likes love stories, I've heard Turgenev has written all kinds of them—you might try borrowing one of his to read" [269]). Other devices common to realist fiction are employed, but self-consciously: a flashback, for example, is announced first with a quotation from Turgenev ("Pardon me, beloved reader, but let me guide you back several years") and then with a blunt heading in bold letters ("ADDITIONAL NARRATION") that makes an absurdity of Turgenev's delicacy (49–50). Most radically, the ending of the novel, like that of "Mr. Jing Ye," intentionally frustrates readers' curiosity about the outcome of the plot. In the final chapter Zhang stages an interview in which the narrator tries to wrest from two of the novel's characters the information he needs to wrap up their story; they refuse to cooperate and walk off remarking, "If you don't mind, we have things to do; in times like these, how can you keep chattering on about such trivia?" (271). This ending amounts, of course, to an assault on the readers, who, it is implied, should themselves be attending to better things. Such a parody of the formal conventions of realist fiction allows Zhang to achieve a double purpose: while continuing to employ the suspect conventions to structure and pattern his story he at the same time calls them into question.
The plot of Cogwheel , which concerns the radical education of a naive country girl at the hands of a group of self-styled revolutionaries, also makes specific parodic reference to Mao Dun's "Disillusionment." The girl resembles Jing, and her name, Huixian
She used to envy those girls; she felt she couldn't measure up to them. They felt free to love the country (indeed, they had loved a number of countries more than once, mostly in May), and they could sing foreign songs and wear high heels. But today, at long last she felt she was a match for them: here she was at a rally loving her country, and she was perfectly capable of wearing high heels too if she chose to. (38)
In the end political rallies become confused with theatrical performances, and the characters' behavior itself comes to seem purely performative, detached from any ideological moorings. The young people use the rallies as occasions for sexual cruising, fussing more over their personal appearance than over the content of their slogans ("While shouting, he combed his hair with his fingers" [81]). When bored with political rallies, they rush off to the theater, but the major rally that occurs near the end of the book is itself little more than a vaudeville show, whose bill of fare includes speeches, songs, dances, and even a skit prepared by Huixian's friends, entitled "Action News" and touted with the slogan "Art can save the country" (214–15). In the penultimate chapter the characters' fatuous conversations—about such fashionable topics as contradictions and the meaning of life—are set against stark headlines announcing the Japanese invasion of Shanghai. Eventually, as though to restore some sobriety to the novel's treatment of this important historical event, the narration abandons its characters and resorts to a straightforward journalistic account, interrupted by the cries, not of fashionable revolutionaries, but of the anonymous masses reacting with heroic indignation (251–60).
Cogwheel is a hothouse in which one finds growing all the elements of Zhang Tianyi's fiction: parodic exaggeration, which finds its freest expression in the farcical novels A Diary of Hell and Yangjingbin qixia
Mao Dun was not the only author to be offended by the humor of Zhang Tianyi's fiction. Even some of those who had been the first to recognize his talent objected to the wilder manifestations of Zhang's parodic spirit. Lu Xun wrote in a letter to Zhang that his fiction was often "too jocular,"[65] and Qu Qiubai, in a review of A Diary of Hell , complained that his writing was too schematic and self-indulgent.[66] Wang Shuming
[65] Lu Xun, letter to Zhang Tianyi, 1 February 1933, in Lu Xun, Lu Xun quanji 12:143–44, here p. 144.
cisms assume the conventional realistic standards that the parodic passages in Zhang's works were designed to undercut. Zhang disdained the earnest artisanship that underlay those standards, as his rapid and somewhat carefree writing habits make clear: Zhou Songdi wrote that Zhang "would write every day for more than ten hours without stopping. He was frequently able to finish an eight-thousand-to-nine-thousand-character short story, and averaged more than two thousand characters a day."[68] Zhang viewed his stories not as polished and enduring works of art but as rapid-fire, topical communications; to him they were less objects for meditation than incentives to act. The stylistic and formal innovations he employed—the aborted closures, the comic-book expletives, the caricatures—were all designed to challenge the complacency of his audience and thus to prevent his stories from simply being "consumed" as examples of a bourgeois art form.
Perhaps the most insightful critical evaluation of Zhang Tianyi by one of his contemporaries is an essay written by Hu Feng in 1935, entitled simply "On Zhang Tianyi." Hu Feng praises Zhang Tianyi's fiction in many of the same terms used by Feng Naichao. Zhang, he writes, has overcome the individualism and sentimentality of earlier May Fourth fiction and succeeded in painting a fresh and convincing picture of the self-delusions and cruelties of China's petty bourgeoisie. Hu Feng goes on, however, in an analysis of Zhang Tianyi as a plain materialist
The necessity Hu Feng speaks of here is that of a reified social pattern. Eschewing both physical and psychological description, Zhang is forced to define character solely in terms of the individual's socially
[68] Zhou Songdi, "Wo he Tianyi xiangchu de rizi," p. 69.
[70] Hu Feng, "Zhang Tianyi lun," in Shen, Huang, and Hu, Zhang Tianyi yanjiu ziliao , p. 279.
meaningful acts and intentions. Since characters are denied any internal reality divorced from such patterning, they are compelled, as it were, to simply play the role in which society has cast them. As a consequence, all behavior in Zhang's fictional world takes on a theatrical quality. Actions are dictated by a purely situational social logic. Characters struggle, not to remain true to internal psychological or ideological compulsions, but simply to maximize their control over whatever social circumstances present themselves.
In an essay he wrote on the subject of humor, Zhang Tianyi once wrote, "Isn't it true that we Chinese most love face?"[71] To succeed in their social manipulations, the characters in Zhang's world must present a consistent and understandable face to the world, and the construction of such social personas is the primary subject of Zhang Tianyi's fiction. Maintaining face is, of course, an essentially theatrical project, which relies for its success on the actor's awareness of his or her audience. Social behavior, as Zhang Tianyi presents it, is thus in its essence specular: individuals discover and define themselves by carefully monitoring the response others give to their actions. To convey this understanding of human behavior, Zhang frequently resorts to situational irony: typically, a character is confronted successively with two very different audiences; to maintain face with each group he or she must give two highly contradictory performances. Readers are left to evaluate the discrepancy between these two performances and answer for themselves the moral question posed by that discrepancy. "Dizhu"
becomes clear that not so much his daughter's innocence as the bulwark of his own morality is being assailed. While self-righteously intoning to his daughter that "a person shouldn't listen to things that aren't proper," he feels himself increasingly fascinated by the "irresistible" conversation next door. He finally goes to inquire, only to discover that one of the conversationalists is an acquaintance, President Xiao
Crucial to the situational irony of "The Bulwark" is the story's setting: the passenger ship is the site of a convergence of social groupings that make it impossible for Huang to maintain a clear partitioning of social roles. In Zhang Tianyi's longer fiction the city plays a similar role. The constant collision of social spheres in the urban environment provides repeated opportunities for hypocritical behavior, as well as for its exposure. Fascinated by the challenge such encounters constitute for individuals as they struggle to maintain face, Zhang situated all of his later novels in the city, including the two that conform most closely to the realist model, Yi nian (A year, 1933) and Zai chengshi li (In the city, 1937).[73] The premise for both these novels is the same: an
unsophisticated villager arrives in the city, where he is gradually introduced to a wide array of imposters and evildoers. In A Year , we follow the progress of an honest village tailor named Bai Muyi
At the time of A Year 's publication in 1933, a critic complained, with some justification, that the story "could be cut off at any point or could go on for another hundred pages" without significantly altering its effect.[74]In the City is considerably more successful, largely because it is organized around a central plot conflict, a family feud over a plot of inherited land. Like A Year, In the City opens with the arrival of a character from the country, in this case a shifty opportunist named Ding Shousong
Ding Shousong and Tang Qikun represent two modes of self-interest, the one wily and sycophantic, the other pompous and despotic. Much of the comic effect of the novel results from their apparently contrasting but finally complementary styles of self-deception and manipulation. One of their early meetings is described as follows:
Tang Qikun looked the other over. Ding Shousong's eyes, one small, one large, seemed to be begging for mercy, and his back was hunched as though he were cowering under the weight of Tang's authority. With his usual insight into character, Tang felt that this Ding, despite his surname, was a reliable sort after all. He would probably do whatever he was told, and that might make him useful for a variety of errands—once, that is, Tang had him completely under his thumb.
Tang's face suddenly took on a severe expression, as though, having accepted the role of master, he needed to exhibit his authority. (570)
A later encounter is described in similar terms:
Looking at the wretched shape before him, Tang felt a rushing through his veins as though he had just injected a vial of glucose straight into his heart. He couldn't resist twisting his face into a furious expression and issuing a loud harrumph through his nose. Without saying a word, he fixed a powerful glare on Ding. He loved to watch people like this squirm.
Ding gave a little cough and looked down with a mortified expression. Closing his left eye into a narrow slit, he peeped timidly at Second Master with his right eye.
"What can I do for you, Second Master?"
He knew he ought to say something more than that. He ought to ask how Second Master had slept last night or whether he had had too much to drink. But in this atmosphere even the best oiled of tongues would congeal, and Ding's mouth was stuck fast. (608)
Ding Shousong's groveling, however, proves just as affected as Tang's self-assurance: his servile manner is calculated to win Tang Qikun's patronage. His actual feelings when Tang first employs him are characterized as follows:
Secretly he felt that Second Master should recognize his, Ding Shousong's, position. Everyone knew he had better opportunities than this and that his own family would help him out in a pinch. Lately these Tangs had been acting in a particularly high-handed fashion, and the
present proposal was something of an insult. Did they really expect him to help promote a wastrel like Tang Qikun?
But still, where there was a profit to be made, Ding could never just walk away. (570)
The faces Tang and Ding present to each other, the one imperious, the other deferential, are equally false. Tang Qikun's confident manner conceals his growing desperation as the web of lies and pretense on which his authority is based comes unraveled. Ding Shousong's servility, on the other hand, serves as a cover for his personal appetites. His rather tenuous kinship ties with both branches of the family (the exact nature of which are never spelled out) force both sides to grudgingly admit him into their circle. These ties secure his loyalty to neither, and he soon becomes a double agent, carrying information from one branch of the family to the other; in the end he divulges to the Dings Tang Qikun's plan to sell the family property, thus hastening Tang's fall.
When first enlisting Ding's services, Tang warns him several times that "the city is not like the country" and instructs him not to run loose
Tang Qikun dismisses him, Ding goes to the study where the clocks are kept to pilfer a few:
The watches hanging on the wall were ticking noisily; they seemed to be competing to see which could go the fastest. One was ticking so enthusiastically that it swung violently back and forth on its chain. Several alarm clocks stood by stiffly and haughtily as though awareness of their own loud chime made them contemptuous of the others. The desk clocks, however, seemed uninterested in this competition, absorbed as they were in their slow, rhythmic tick, tock, tick, tock . (795)
Ding Shousong is caught in the act and evicted from the Tang household, but the cacophonous sound of the Tangs' clocks echoes throughout the book.[75] At the novel's conclusion, Tang Qikun, wandering the streets contemplating his ruin, ominously hears "the great clock by the river strike twelve." Although the time struck here is noon, it carries much the same sense of termination (and imminent rebirth) as the stroke of midnight does in Mao Dun's novel. In both In the City and Midnight such references connote an objective progression of time and history to which the characters themselves remain blinded; we, as readers, however, recognize that the march of events will inevitably overtake the characters and in the process expose their petty ambitions and squabbles as the mere flotsam of history.
These similarities to Midnight notwithstanding, Tang Qikun does not attain the tragic stature of Wu Sunfu. He is, at least at the beginning of the novel, depicted as pure appetite, without the larger ideals that motivate Wu Sunfu. Ironically, he only begins to elicit a measure of sympathy when, late in the novel, we see him in the secret second household he has established with a young woman named Yajie
He heard her sniffling and rasping as though she had a cold. She was always whimpering about things and getting thinner and more haggard by the day. He couldn't bear looking at her anymore, for fear her piti-
able, swollen face would confirm his feelings of guilt. He mumbled exasperatedly, "It's too much, I can't stand it!"
Suddenly feelings of regret and shame overwhelmed him. He longed to run to her side, utter some soothing words, and then move her and his son across the river, where she could live proudly in the city as his second wife. (698)
As Tang admits to himself, he has experienced a true familial happiness only with Yajie and her son. His desire to legitimize the relationship is perhaps the single good impulse he evinces in the novel. Unsurprisingly, however, he fails to act on it—not just because of the social embarrassment that would follow but also because making this second family public would destroy the pleasure he has found in it. In his legitimate family he is constantly forced to play a part, to assert his mastery by impersonating the gestures and mannerisms of the powerful; only in the private world of his adulterous family can he indulge his true feelings of powerlessness, regret, and shame. In the relationship's secrecy lies its ability to gratify his deeper emotions. This second family, however, is a luxury supportable only as long as Tang maintains his wealth and reputation in the outside society. When these are stripped from him at the end of the novel, he loses Yajie and his son as well. Just at the time he hears the news of his bankruptcy, he learns of the boy's death, an event that leaves him feeling "childless" despite his large legitimate family. Then in the final chapter, Tang Qikun learns that Yajie has herself run off with the man he hired to look after her. They have left only the ironical message "Thank you for serving as our matchmaker."
Zhang Tianyi's relentless focus on his characters' petty ambitions and on the superficial manifestations of social life can in longer works become repetitive and stifling; the touches of irony and psychological complexity that we have observed in his portrayal of Tang Qikun come as a welcome relief, although most readers would agree that they arrive too late in the novel. One senses that in works like A Year and In the City , Zhang has taken the criticisms of his earlier novels too much to heart and consciously suppressed his instincts for formal innovation in the interests of a conventionally realistic representation of Chinese society. Where Zhang allows his satirical and parodic instincts a freer reign, as in the inventive farce Strange Knight of Shanghai and in many of his short stories, he avoids the "plodding" quality that C. T. Hsia rightly complains mars A Year and In the City .[76] The short story,
in particular, was well suited to Zhang's temperament and to the themes that preoccupied him as a writer; it allowed him to spotlight an isolated scene of social theater without belaboring its dramatization with the descriptive and interpretive passages that he found so tiresome in Turgenev's and Mao Dun's fiction. Zhang's spotlight commonly picks out a scene of considerable violence in which an empowered individual forces a victim to enact a ritual humiliation. Often these encounters are related through the eyes of the victim, generally a child or defenseless woman. From such a perspective the villain takes on a savage, comic-book quality; he or she comes to embody power in a threatening, almost abstract sense. In such stories Zhang confronts the reader with stark dramatizations—divorced from mitigating psychological or ideological rationales—of the exercise of power in Chinese society.
The leverage powerful individuals emloy to compel their victims' compliance in these stories is rarely a matter of simple brute force: often it is provided by the threat of a secret's exposure. The early story "Baofu"
[76] Strange Knight of Shanghai is a parodic treatment of martial arts romances and is not directly relevant to our discussion here. For a description of the novel see C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction , pp. 231–35.
and then gives her a useless foreign coin for her services. He is driven less by sexual need than by a desire to cuckold her husband, who has insulted him. Jiuye further mortifies Fa Xin Sao by insisting that she smile: "I'm not happy to see such a sour face. . . . Just give me a little smile!" (123). When she discovers the nature of the coin he has given her, she goes to a teahouse she knows he patronizes to insist he exchange it, but he taunts her: "How is it that I, Jiuye, should have given you a dollar? What kind of debt have I contracted? Tell me in front of everyone here, and I'll immediately give you another dollar in exchange" (122). That he has violated her is an open secret, but he knows that any public appeal for justice on her part would, in the eyes of the world, be tantamount to admitting she had prostituted herself. Fa Xin Sao clearly finds the enforced dramatization of her humiliation more agonizing than the rape itself.
In "Revenge" and "Smile" power is asserted nakedly, that is, without accompanying moral rationale. In both cases sex is not in itself the motivation for the male's violence but rather the means by which he avenges his bruised ego and asserts his authority. This authority arises, however, not just from his financial clout or physical strength but also from the sexual double standard; it is thus supported by the whole weight of a social order that sanctions, indeed mandates, certain kinds of hypocritical behavior. The bullying male may act the puppeteer in these ritual acts of aggression, but the social order with its conventions has provided the script.
Stories such as "Revenge" and "Smile" pit villains against victims in brutal power plays; ideology—the intellectual manipulation of the grounds for social conventions—has no place in the lives of these characters or in their stories. As we have already seen in our discussion of "Mr. Jing Ye" and "The Bulwark," however, Zhang Tianyi was frequently concerned with the nature and efficacy of ideological commitment. But his ideologically engaged characters, whether conservative defenders of conventional morality or self-styled reformers, typically discover, to their comic surprise, that their own behavior is working to undermine the belief system that they profess. Ideological explanations somehow never provide the fixed perspective on the social hierarchy that they are intended to provide. Ideology may serve a tactical purpose in a character's project of social ascent, but to the extent that beliefs are sincerely held, they serve only to hinder the climb. In "Yihang"
Sanghua
Those who remain cynically immune to the self-deceptions of ideology and operate by a pure politics of performance fare better in Zhang Tianyi's world, although their actions are the object of chilling authorial disapproval. Such an individual is the title character of "Mr. Hua Wei,"[81] a story that was greeted upon its appearance at the height of the war with Japan as having precisely captured the nature of a certain kind of Chinese bureaucrat.[82] Mr. Hua Wei, whose surname means
"China" and whose given name means "dignity" or "awe" but is a homophone for the character meaning "crisis," maintains his powerful position in the resistance movement simply by promoting the appearance of leadership. He does nothing but attend meetings, always arriving late and leaving early, proffering nothing more substantial than a call to step up resistance work and a reminder of the importance of preserving a "center of leadership"—by which phrase he clearly refers to himself. Mr. Hua Wei believes his dignity depends on two things: he must be informed of every local meeting related to the War of Resistance, and he must make at least a cursory appearance at each of them. Associates who fail either to report meetings or to invite his personal attendance risk accusations of treason or worse. As Mr. Hua Wei well understands, his power comes first from a panoptical awareness of all activity connected with the resistance and second from the constant reminder of his omniscience that his personal appearances constitute. He intuitively understands that his political position is determined not by substantive actions or ideas but solely by his appearance at these meetings. Such performative politics may be effective within the closed system of Chinese society in aligning relations of power so that they favor Mr. Hua Wei, but, as the text with its larger vision makes clear, they are not only ineffective in the face of such threats to the system's existence as the Japanese invasion but seriously undermine its powers of resistance as well. The national crisis announced by his name is at once the excuse for Mr. Hua Wei's activities and the result of the kind of self-aggrandizing leadership he represents.
In Zhang Tianyi's world all behavior, whether political or sexual, is thus reduced to an expression of the will to power. In a few exceptional stories even the arts are examined in this light. In "Xia ye meng"
to perform pervades her dreams: in one nightmare she finds herself on stage unable to utter a sound, to the amusement of the audience and the fury of her "Mama" at the orphanage, who beats her. Even in her waking hours she experiences no natural pleasure in singing; training makes her feel as if "things, tightly bound, were being dragged forcibly from her mouth." Her instructor, "Elder," a once-rich man who has squandered his inheritance on his passion for opera, has an explanation for her displeasure that reflects his personal dissatisfactions: "Singing's fun when you're an amateur, but when you turn professional, it disgusts you" (388). Yunfang is indeed being trained as a professional, who must for survival enact the nostalgic dreams of Elder's amateur past. As such, she is not expected to have personal feelings for the songs she sings or for the stories she enacts: upon observing her tearful response to a popular song, the matron of the orphanage admonishes her, "What are you bawling about, stupid! People will laugh at you. Movies aren't real!" (378). Nevertheless, the stories she performs, particularly those that concern the reuniting of loved ones, have become entangled with her personal dreams of her father's return; she is not sure whether the stories move her because she has heard them so often or because they "have some special connection with her fate" (370). One of the other girls at the school enviously interprets Yunfang's orphanhood as a kind of freedom: "Whatever you do, it's up to you; she's not your real mother anyhow" (379). But Yunfang herself feels differently: she keeps waiting for the vague memories of her infancy to be "reenacted" (380), for her relationships to take on a sense of reality. She enviously tells her friend, "You're much better off than we. . . . Your mother is your real mother, your kid brother is your real kid brother" (379). Her emotional life has become so inextricably bound up with the performance of others' fantasies that she can only wonder helplessly, "Why can't one pick one's dreams?" (376). Once her imagination has been contaminated with the drama she is compelled to perform, her spiritual imprisonment is as secure as her physical imprisonment by the school walls.
Another story composed the same year, "Yige ticai"
fession, fiction writing, may contaminate those it touches in a similar way. The narrator in the story, a novelist called Master Han
Auntie Qing Er has been doubly violated, first by the landlord's son and then by Master Han, whose prying has humiliated her into retracting her story in the final line, thus enabling him to appropriate it and present it to us as his own. Auntie Qing Er was wrong about story writing; fiction does require a kind of capital—in the form of precisely such tales of personal violation as her own. But Auntie's illiteracy means that she can never directly deploy her capital on the literary market and that she must entrust her story to a representative of the literate class such as Master Han. His detective work—if not his prurient manner—may seem justified for its role in disclosing the underlying moral corruption of the landlord's son. But Master Han's project of ethical probing, to the extent that it is operative, succeeds only against the victim's will and in the wake of her personal mortification; it is an exclusively male dialogue conducted by directing blows at a female third party. As resourceful as Auntie is in dealing
with social inferiors, her only means of establishing intercourse with her literate betters is by using either her physical body, subject to sexual exploitation, or the spoken word, itself subject, as the story dramatizes, to the exploitation of writing. In the same manner, all characters and objects given representation in fiction are, in the process of their translation into writing, subject to a kind of violation: their stories—their being—are taken in hand by an elevated third party (the author), who exploits their exclusion from writing to ensure that the literary product possesses the substantiality of the Real. They are inevitably and always found objects whose fictional presentation redounds to the authority of the finder. Just as the opera in "A Summer Night's Dream" both coerced Yunfang's performance and interfered in her own emotional life, so fiction not only elicits Auntie Qing Er's confessional performance but forces her to shape her life story into the sort of sensational material required for a short story.
As we have seen, both Mao Dun and Zhang Tianyi grounded their fictional projects in a refusal to engage in May Fourth introspection; both stubbornly turned their gaze away from the self toward society. This intention is evident in the content of their fiction (with its rejection of autobiography) and in their concern with the social efficacy of the new literature. Despite this common premise, however, and despite their shared understanding of society as an arena of conflict where historical contradictions play themselves out, the two authors produced fiction of markedly different styles and forms. Mao Dun, with his novelistic impulses, constantly labored to expand his narrative vision so that it would comprehend all of historical reality. Modeling his work on the great nineteenth-century Western realists, he sought to make his fictional world commensurate with society at large, to offer a descriptive portrait so complete that one could trace in it all the complex relations of cause and effect that determine historical progress. He attempted, that is, to repair the fragmentation of contemporary society through aesthetic means and thereby allow readers to glimpse—if only momentarily—the totality of the historical moment. Zhang Tianyi, on the other hand, actively fractured the surface of his fiction so that it would itself reflect the shattered social environment. He focused his attention less on the motivations of his characters than on the consequences of their actions; in particular, he was fascinated with the way in which all human behavior constitutes the enactment
—and finally the reinforcement—of fundamental social divisions. Zhang's emphasis on the externalities of social behavior is paralleled by the linguistic play that characterizes his work; whereas Mao Dun's highly literary style works to naturalize his narrative voice, lulling readers into a passive acceptance of his vision of the world, Zhang Tianyi's aggressive and often-facetious narrative personae repeatedly call attention to the linguistic surface of the text, shocking readers into recognizing an ingenerate relationship between the signifying practices the text parodies and the social practices it describes.
The highlighting of the text's performative quality in Zhang Tianyi's works—evident in his unusual stylistic and formal experiments and in his affinity for parody—reveals a high level of artistic self-consciousness and makes him, of all Chinese realists, seem closest in spirit to Western modernists. The Japanese critic Ito[*] Keiichi
Zhang Tianyi's point of departure was his disillusionment with reality and his desire to find a new means of expressing his despair. Humankind was, in his view, already stripped of hope and moral direction and no longer able to maintain a sense of spiritual wholeness. The old techniques of realism and romanticism were inadequate to communicate this kind of spiritual disintegration and self-alienation, so he turned to a more penetrating, impressionistic means of expression.[85]
Neo-impressionism did in fact exert an important influence over Chinese writers in the early 1930s (including such committed realists as Sha Ting
of representation the material whose exploration is the substantive heart of modernism, the subconscious and the surreal. In a 1939 article entitled "Art and Struggle" he wrote, "You are clearly standing there. You have your friends and your enemies. . . . Where is your ivory tower?"[87] Both author and work, he argues, are inextricably situated in an embattled social environment; in the end all literature must announce its allegiance in the larger social contest.
Here again Mao Dun and Zhang Tianyi meet on common ground: both writers, while giving full expression to their generation's feelings of disillusionment and despair, refused any means of consolation that did not recognize the fundamentally historical nature of their plight. Both denounced all recourse to aesthetic or psychological universals and insisted that their work was bound to a particular moment and to a particular milieu. Consolation was to be found only in the potential for change within Chinese society itself and in the capacity of fiction not simply to reflect the times in which they lived, but actively to propel the wheels of history. As realists, however, Mao Dun and Zhang Tianyi continued to insist that these progressive forces be discoverable within the world as they observed and described it, not forcibly imposed from an external ideological framework. They found themselves, in short, caught in an intermediate position, resisting both the determinism of a purely reflectionist aesthetic and the naive voluntarism of the ideologues. In the following chapter we will examine the various tactics employed by Chinese realists of the 1930s in their effort to stake out and defend this middle ground.